The Inheritance Cycle: Brisingr by: Christopher Paolini

Brisngr is a frustrating book.  The third installment of The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini, it was with this book the decision was taken to extend the trilogy to a quartet as Paolini found there was too much material to complete in one book.  This is a decision on which I am a bit conflicted.  While overall the ending of this book is clearly one that found a natural endpoint as it builds to a final battle where Eragon can use his forged sword essentially for the first time, and the beginning is a rescue mission to find Katrina, Roran’s betrothed, and her father Sloan, who betrayed their entire villains in Eldest, the middle of the book is Paolini at his most meandering.  While Eldest showed great improvement in writing and began to juggle multiple plot lines, it is Brisingr which takes a step back and is unable to give many of its plot lines satisfactory arcs.  There are subplots and ideas that run their course, sure, and some of them have some interesting pieces of character work, but they feel more episodic in nature and not really developing towards the overall plot outside of tenuous connections.  For instance, there is a sequence where Elva, the girl Eragon blessed in the first book is healed from her affliction and has a great character moment where she strikes out on her own to control herself and train under Angela.  She then does not appear again for the rest of the book nor does it actually impact the plot in any way.  That doesn’t mean it’s a badly written sequence, far from it, it’s quite interesting and Eragon and Saphira’s reactions to Elva are great, but it does feel inconsequential.

 

This is exacerbated by Paolini attempting to write a narrative that is politically driven instead of the more action driven narratives of the previous two books.  Brisingr’s plot is very much allowing our three main point of view characters to have their own political struggle, Eragon among the dwarfs, Nasuada among the Varden, and Roran with his wife in an attempt to increase the book’s page count, since the actual plot progression really isn’t there.  The plot in this one only really progresses through continuous sequences of exposition with sporadic musings on politics and philosophy.  Eragon’s plot with the dwarfs while clearly intended to have the reader follow the ponderous nature of the dwarfs making decision, feels like it loses much of its tension, especially since while there is always the threat of King Galbatorix and Murtagh (who doesn’t ever actually appear in this book).  The plodding goes on for over 700 pages without any real sense of conclusion to come by the end of the book, okay there is a battle in the end which goes into a siege that is nice, and the ending is suitably bleak with a major character death, but it doesn’t feel like there is really any impact.  Nasuada’s plot also feels less important than in Eldest making her sections of the book feeling more like an afterthought from Paolini to be a bridge for things.  Roran’s sequence is perhaps the closest Paolini gets to a coherent arc, mainly because Roran is continually struggling with authority and the corruption inherent in any group of armed forces as well as the fears for his new wife and their child.  There is a sequence where he is whipped for insubordination and then given command in a power play by Nasuada which is perhaps the capstone to his character arc and the actual pain he is willing to endure to save the ones he loves.

 

This is contrast in Eragon’s plot which has several brilliant moments, especially near the very beginning and ending of the book, but the middle is lacking.  His interactions with Sloan and ponderance on the nature of a Dragon Rider is the first piece of truly interesting writing from Paolini about the morality of killing someone evil.  It continues on his ideas about the Urgals having their own culture and existence and not being inherently evil, especially as Sloan, a human, is the one person Eragon decides he cannot live.  Paolini also makes the proper decision to not have Sloan in the end turn to the good, he is left blind and alone, not even knowing really if his daughter is alive and honestly that’s something I hope Inheritance doesn’t actually pick up on as it’s a perfectly good ending for the character.  This could also have been Eragon’s actual motivation for the rest of the book, but it feels as if it’s dropped by the end and is not tied into the forging of his sword.  The forging sequence is done though magic and does a riff on the trope of forging a sword from a meteorite which has been done in fantasy since the dawn of time, but it's still an interesting sequence for character building (and making it a flaming sword just plays into the rule of cool) and there is an interesting exploration of the magic system here.

 

Sadly, Brisingr on the whole is perhaps not worth the sum of its parts.  Paolini is definitely more developed in prose and clearly has an end goal in mind for The Inheritance Cycle, but that end goal is something that will be very difficult to see to the end since it’s taking the book too long to do very little.  There are sequences that are genuinely good, one or two that you could argue is even great, but it is a book which could have used at least another draft if it wished to not feel like a step back to the quality of Eragon. 5/10.